Highlights from the world of Enterprise Software and Solutions over the past week:

Lots of activity in the mobility world – Apple seems to have set the date for the iPad mini (this Tuesday, 23 October), Google promoting the Chromebook, rumors of new Google Nexus devices, Microsoft Windows 8 Surface tablet details announced and pre-orders available, and Windows 8 phones leaked. It’s a good time to be a gadget freak!

Tough quarter for on-premise enterprise vendors, with Microsoft, Intel, and HP all announcing disappointing results. Google pre-announces, unintentionally – I guess that document release software is still in beta …

Workday’s stock continues its torrid appeal, rising to a market cap close to $10B.

Stay up to date on #EnSW by following @dbmoore or hashtag #EnSW on Twitter.

Google doesn’t really care if Android makes it in the enterprise. It’s a consumer platform. The cloud-centric Chrome is its enterprise play.

Let’s recap:

The first Chromebook was released at $349 more than a year ago. The price was good, but not great. But Samsung’s sleek new $249 Chromebook aggressively undercuts the $499 iPad on price the way many observers thought Microsoft needed to do with the Surface RT.

Instead, it’s the new Chromebook that is:

– half the price of the iPad and the Surface RT;

– half to one-third the price of Windows 8 convertible tablets (see my gallery of 17 of them here). Without keyboards, most of these Atom-based ‘tabtops’ or ‘laptablets’ run between $500 and $900;

– one-third to one-fourth the price of Windows 8 ultrabooks, which run between $800 to $1,200.

At these prices, what CIO or IT manager wouldn’t give the Chromebook a serious look?

A data governance initiative must build competencies, assign roles and responsibilities and invest in technologies to enable these core processes no matter the scope and scale of your business objectives. A pilot data governance project focusing on improving the quality or security of a single data item, phone number as an example, should follow the same approach as a holistic data governance function that’s managing all business critical data assets. The difference of course is the level of effort, time, resources and enabling technologies required to effectively deliver business value. The process to validate, cleanse, improve, and monitor the quality of ‘phone number’ in a single application for a single business unit – while far from being a miniscule task -will be significantly less effort than managing hundreds, thousands or more business critical data entities across an entire global enterprise.

Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc @Benioff opens Cloudforce New York live from the Javits Center. He shares his insights into how the social revolution is changing business as we know it. He speaks with Martha Poulter, CIO, GE Capital, about how salesforce.com products have transformed the way that GE does business.

Google. Microsoft. Facebook. Intel. Hewlett-Packard. What do these companies have in common? All got fabulously rich on business models that thrived on traditional personal computers. All are struggling to adapt to a new world in which mobile devices will dominate. All are getting punished by investors in the meantime.

The biggest miss appears to have been from Motorola…Google still missed across the board…Google’s advertising cost per click is falling…Google says it wasn’t planning an early release, which sent the stock cratering…Google is giving up a huge chunk of its gains for the past several weeks.

The filing was made under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, which allows companies to file to go public with the Securities and Exchange Commission without disclosing those documents to the public until it nears an IPO.

Simmer said the team is due to receive a new wing sail early in the new year. That wing sail, being built in Auckland, New Zealand, was to have been used for a second AC72 catamaran. The platform for the second boat, including the hulls and crossbeams, is being built in San Francisco.

Among those that got away: photo-sharing service Instagram, which was sold to Facebook Inc. for $1 billion earlier this year; social scrapbooking site Pinterest Inc.; GitHub Inc., which lets developers write and collaborate on software projects; and Path Inc., a social-networking service.

@Benioff maintained that Salesforce.com isn’t keen on going further into back-office processes for now. “We integrate with the back-office providers like SAP and Oracle but we want to be that dominant front-office provider, and that’s the piece we’re focused on,” he said.

Though the sagging PC sales were expected, some analysts said they were surprised by a step back in growth at other parts of the company, including in the division selling back-office software that runs on server systems. The 8% revenue increase in that division, called Server & Tolls, is a comedown from prior quarters—perhaps a sign businesses have curtailed spending on computer technology.

Today there are over half a billion Android devices-half a billion – with 1.3 million more being activated every day. You should all run out and buy the Nexus 7 tablet for $199. It’s had rave reviews and recently won “Gadget of the Year” from T3, the gadget experts. You’ll love the integration with Google Play. It is an amazing device.

This time last year I announced that our run-rate for mobile advertising hit $2.5 billion. That seemed like a pretty big number — even for Google. Now we have built up additional mobile revenue from users paying for content and apps in Google Play. Including these new sources grossed up, I can announce our new run-rate for mobile is now over $8 billion. That’s quite a business.

Windows will now consist of two very different user experiences bound into a single package. The idea is it’s a one-size-fits-all operating system, which can run on everything from older, mouse-driven PCs to touch-controlled tablets without compromise. Everything from a touch-based weather app to mouse-driven Excel will run on it. That’s a big contrast to Apple’s approach, which uses separate operating systems for its iPad tablets and more standard Mac computers.

Some 30% of online buyers began researching their last online purchase with Amazon, compared with 13% researching a product on Google, according to a new Forrester survey of nearly 4,000 US respondents.’

“Google continues to rocket forward. Let’s not forget Apple was slammed back in July and they’re doing just fine,” Ken Marlin, an analyst at Marlin & Associates, told FOX Business. “I do think it’s a buying opportunity.”

Oracle, like many companies, is sitting on billions in cash right now. Does anything change after the election? Do you see anything loosening up in terms of business?

A: Stability is always good for the economy. I’d have to say hopefully with the election, we gain stability, and the ability to focus on growth in the economy. If that happens, it’s going to be even better. There’s no question to us a growth economy is better than not.

So this means that Hana on Amazon is geared toward smaller businesses or smaller apps and isn’t really a replacement for buying the Hana appliance, or for using SAP’s new cloud, for a typical enterprise database. As for those other fees, Hana One costs 99 cents an hour, plus another $2.50 per hour for the Amazon hardware that provides 60GB of RAM. That’s a total of $3.49 per hour. Amazon could charge other fees, too, depending on how much data is being used.

To compare, SAP’s entry-level price for Hana for companies that aren’t already using its other business software starts at roughly $52,000.

Starting up an SAP HANA instance on AWS takes only a few minutes, plus some time to download, install and configure SAP HANA Studio. If you have done it before, all those tasks combined will take much less than 30 minutes. And if you have never done it before, we put the required steps at your fingertips at www.cloud.saphana.com.

Conventional wisdom tells us that CIOs should focus on “feeds and speeds,” which is another way to describe infrastructure and applications. However, that coventional wisdom is wrong; today’s CIO must become a business leader who stands on equal footing with other C-level counterparts. That’s the best way to avoid Bob Evan’s four threats that lead to CIO suicide.

Why might Salesforce be motivated to ditch Oracle? For one, there’s the cost — though Monash speculates that Salesforce has a favorable licensing deal with Oracle. And there’s the apparent hostility between Benioff and Ellison.

SAP jumped into the cloud platform-as-a-service market on Tuesday by launching the first in a series of planned cloud-based application services and database services. Announced at the vendor’s annual TechEd conference in Las Vegas, the new services make SAP a more comprehensive cloud player and open up new points of competition with the likes of Oracle and Salesforce.com.

Workday has been actively poaching talent from other Bay Area companies with many new recruits going back to their previous employers to lure their former co-workers. According to some industry insiders, Workday has also been offering its employees referral bonuses starting at $5,000 to motivate new talent acquisition. Workday founders Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri have a reputation for being role models with their open and transparent leadership styles; however, Workday is also known to operate like a sweat shop with employees averaging at least 60 hours a week.

A nearly $8 million, 72-foot catamaran used by the Oracle Team USA, the defending America’s Cup champion, capsized during practice near the Golden Gate Bridge Tuesday and was severely damaged. There were no injuries but the $2 million wing of the new ship was was “damaged beyond recognition,” team officials said.

So, at some point, maybe in 2013, Virgin’s seatback video screen will greet you by name and know your Elevate status when you sit down on your flight. It will offer you food and drink based on what you’ve ordered on previous flights.

If your flight is delayed, it will push information to your seatback regarding connecting flight information or changes– and provide you with alternatives before you land. It will also provide access to your Elevate account.

A: We’ve got a fairly simple strategy. Offer customers best-of-breed technology at every level. Second, integrate those technologies into engineered systems where we do the work for the customer, make it simpler. Third, we are moving our application suite to the cloud with what we call fusion cloud applications. And fourth, we are focused on industries. That strategy manifests a whole suite of products that we’ve announced over the past, you know, year and a half, two years. As part of that strategy, we’re spending $5 billion of R&D this year and rolling products out into that strategy. And we think it’s going to the core of this trend you see in IT, which is how do I just make things simpler? How do I make it easier? How do I modernize it, standardize my IT infrastructure?

“The first two SDKs available are for Java and PHP. The Rackspace Cloud SDK for Java leverages the popular jclouds open-source library. It has full support for OpenStack Nova (Rackspace Cloud Servers) and OpenStack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files),” the company announced. “The Rackspace Cloud SDK for PHP uses the Rackspace-developed php-opencloud library, which supports Nova, Swift, Rackspace Cloud Networks (preview access), and Rackspace Cloud Databases. “

European regulators did not explicitly call Google’s policy illegal but identified a range of shortcomings that they said could undermine user privacy and confidence in the company. The regulators made numerous recommendations that would allow Google to improve compliance. “As data protection regulators, we expect that Google takes the necessary steps to improve information and clarify the combination of data, and more generally ensure compliance with data protection laws and principles,” the letter said.

“As a high-tech entrepreneur and someone who has actually used Google’s advertising tools to grow my businesses, I encourage the Commission to tread carefully and not undertake action that would compromise the important service provided by Google, reduce Google’s ability to rapidly innovate and improve its products, or make search engine results less useful for consumers or businesses,” he wrote.

Much as Salesforce might like to move off Oracle altogether, for cost as much as bragging rights, completely junking Oracle is probably not an option anytime soon. It is not clear that Postgres could operate at anything like the scale of Salesforce. Even if it could, Salesforce would have to spend a lot of time assuring customers that their data would not be affected. Given the marketing zeal of Salesforce, in fact, it would probably make a case that life was becoming even more fabulous.

Responsibilities:
* Design and implement major pieces of the salesforce.com core database infrastructure
* Formulate, implement, and evaluate algorithms and database techniques to support service scalability and stability

Workday is off to a spectacular public market debut. After coming public Friday at $28 a share, the provider of cloud-based HR software rallied 74% on the first day of trading – and today is up another 8%. The stock lately is trading at $52.67, up another $3.98.

Well, Workday had 1096 employees to CRM@7’s 1304 (i.e. Workday had 84% of CRM@7’s number of employees to produce 43% of their revenue, yet still incur 73% of their costs). That means WDAY saw $122k rev per employee vs. CRM@7’s $238k rev per employee, so nearly a 2x favor to CRM@7.

Enterprise Software veteran, with over twenty years' experience on every side of of business, from user and buyer to VP, CEO and Board Member roles; from Procter & Gamble to Oracle, SAP and OQO. Founder of the OracAlumni Network.
Aactively tracks the trends and strategies of the enterprise software world, shares his news digest and analysis at Next Gen Enterprise.